Torrent Sites

Since the fall of Suprnova and others, more sophisticated sites have sprouted like a hydra. Here are the ones which I recommend. Many of these sites require registration, some limit new registration to invites only.

Public Sites - easy to register or just plain open

Demonoid - Very good varied content site with open registration: Software, music by the album, films in various languages, some TV

Mininova - a great open site - No registration. Lots of popular content. No

MVGroup - Open Registration - An amazing site run out of the UK by people who are very serious about documentaries especially BBC and PBS. This is my favourite site on the internet. Great user posted section. Official MVGroup releases are always superb quality rips and interesting and informative content.

ConspiracyCentral - Open registration site. Some niche content Metaphysical, Religious, Paranormal

DigitalDistractions - No Reg. required. Good For Some Specific TV Shows: Nova, Iron Chef, etc.

The Three Sisters - You must be invited to these sites and you must maintain a reasonable upload ratio or you get banned. Invites are hard to come by. Because so many people are desperate to upload, download speeds are amazing and the content is very complete.

BitMeTV - Pretty much every mainstream US television show - downloadable by season.

BitMe - Educational Content - some art, books and audiobooks, documentaries

UKNova - Has all the Current UK television shows.

Torrent Searches - if you know what you want and are willing to download from random people in random places and are not afraid of diseases, give this a try after you have searched your trusted sites.

TorrentSpy - A Torrent Search Engine

isoHunt - Another Torrent Search Engine with an interesting interface

Torrents are not a secure a P2P filesharing method unless you have trust in every peer on the tracker. Ultimately, users who really want a secure but content rich filesharing experience will have to evolve into some sort of a Social Networking automatic subscription service. This has some immediate practical elements, but cannot be a dominant strategy until hard disk space and bandwith become significantly cheaper. More on that later...


Feel free to comment with other sites I should have mentioned


Disclaimer: I do not endorse violating copyrights. Use these sites at your peril. Copyright holders unions are actively suing people, so be careful out there. Share and download only with permission of the copyright holder and after having consulted with a lawyer about any such activities.

Java and C++ Connectivity in Eclipse

I have been trying to get my feet wet with C++ and in addition connect Java with C++. Eclipse, a nice java open source development platform, can be used for C++ development and in turn integration of C++ with Java. I did some searching today for using Quantlib (an open source C++ finance library) with Java and I seem to have hit the gold mine. This is an excellent website which kills many birds with one stone in a very clean and straightforward tutorial environment.

Age of Intelligent Machines

I just watched a talk Terence McKenna gave in 1999 entitled "Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines." This is a very insightful perpective on the potential future interaction between human consciousness and emergent Superintelligent Machines created by human intelligence. McKenna has been strongly influenced by psilocybin from personal experience as well as historical and anthropological research on its influnce on ancient human cultures. His traditional wisdom provides a unique perspective into the technology dominated future of our descendants. Unfortunately, the editor of the video superimposed often distracting visuals over the image of McKenna speaking for much of the video.

It may make more sense avec, but I was able to appreciate this talk sans drogue.

*Update* For those interested in the topic of Transhumanism and Superintelligence: check out Nick Bostrum and Ray Kurtzweil.

Bienvenue

Im too preoccupied at the moment to make a proper blog on my own site. This is actually my second attempt at blogging and almost certainly not the final version. Lets see how it goes...